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Purchasing officials from some of the largest local governments in the country and the contractors they do business with met at the Hilton La Jolla Torrey Pines this month. They attended sessions and enjoyed meals, drinks and golf on the course the hotel overlooks.

The event was hosted by a Bay Area-nonprofit known as the U.S. Communities Government Purchasing Alliance, which is funded by vendors who stand to gain from contracts administered by the officials in attendance.

The co-op of 55,000 governments and nonprofits aims to leverage its members’ buying power to broker low-price contracts for everything from playground equipment to janitorial supplies, and then let government across the country use the contracts.

U.S. Communities has a volunteer advisory board of government purchasing experts, who are invited and expected to attend the annual conference.

Current members of the board include officials from the San Diego Unified School District, Fresno Unified School District, Los Angeles city and county, and officials from agencies in Seattle, Denver, Miami, Phoenix and Houston.

Kevin Juhring, a U.S. Communities general manager, said the conference is an opportunity for its advisory board to discuss the challenges they all face in bringing value to public agencies.

“Those who attended the annual meeting benefit, as well as the thousands of other public agencies who were not there with us,” Juhring said via email. “They benefit from the shared insights, new ideas and a range of solutions to problems that are surfaced in the course of the few days we spend together.”

Hundreds of emails obtained by U-T Watchdog under the California Public Records Act reveal the conference also provides contractors an opportunity to market directly to government officials.

U.S. Communities’ three-day annual conferences have been held in San Diego for seven of the past eight years.

In addition to topical and strategy sessions, this year’s conference included a beanbag-toss tournament, meals and drinks with suppliers and a golf tournament on the Torrey Pines course that grouped purchasing officials on foursomes with contractors and U.S. Communities officials.

An agenda from the group’s 2008 conference provides more detail. It lists seven hours of sessions and 20 hours of presentations from suppliers, breakfasts, lunches, dinners, and either a golf outing or a behind-the-scenes tour of the San Diego Zoo. One event in 2008 was “supplier speed dating,” short personal chats with new co-op contractors.

San Diego software developer Simon Mayeski, who sits on the board of good-government group California Common Cause, said certain kinds of mingling among suppliers and purchasing officials can seem incongruous with open competition and best business practices.

“It seems to me that getting people together with business and exposing them to their products on the one hand is a really good idea,” Mayeski said.

“But if what you’re really talking about is having a relatively small number of people, of businesses who are placed in front of you in a party sort of atmosphere or team building... when you read about how corruption happens, when folks trace it all back it usually starts with an event like that,” Mayeski said.